A roadmap for universal syllabic segmentation.

Space- and time-effective segmentation (word hyphenation) of natural languages remains at the core of every document rendering system, be it TEX, web browser, or mobile operating system. In most languages, segmentation mimicking syllabic pronunciation is a pragmatic preference today. As language switching is often not marked in rendered texts, the typesetting engine needs universal syllabic segmentation. In this article, we show the feasibility of this idea by offering a prototype solution to two main problems: A) Using Patgen to generate patterns for several languages at once; and B) no wide character support in tools like Patgen or TEX hyphenation, e.g. internal Unicode support is missing. For A), we have applied it to generating universal syllabic patterns from wordlists of nine syllabic, as opposed to etymology-based, languages (namely, Czech, Slovak, Georgian, Greek, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Turkmen, and Ukrainian). For B), we have created a version of Patgen that uses the Judy array data structure and compared its effectiveness with the trie implementation. With the data from these nine languages, we show that: A) developing universal, up-to-date, high-coverage, and highly generalized universal syllabic segmentation patterns is possible, with high impact on virtually all typesetting engines, including web page renderers; and B) bringing wide character support into the hyphenation part of the TEX suite of programs is possible by using Judy arrays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]